Remote Desktop alternative for Mac users

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I frequently connect to Windows hosts from my Mac and I have been using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac OS X. The trouble with this is that it only allows a single connection and it’s not a universal binary (it also has a tendency to crash on exit, requiring a forced quit). I use rdesktop on my Linux boxes, and figured it ought to be available for the Mac (it is, using fink, or by compiling from source) but I also came across CoRD (via Lifehacker) and TSclientX (via the comments on the Lifehacker post) – both of which seem to offer a much richer user experience:

  • CoRD allows multiple RDP connections as well as storing login credentials. It seems pretty responsive too.
  • TSclientX s essentially a GUI wrapper for rdesktop and therefore requires X11. That shouldn’t really be a problem but it does sometimes feel like a bit of a kludge – even so, it has the potential to be extremely useful as it supports SeamlessRDP. Unfortunately, SeamlessRDP requires additional software to be present on the remote Windows system and I couldn’t get it to work for me, possibly because I was connecting to a Windows XP machine (which only supports a single connection) and rdesktop creates a X11 window for each window on the server side.

At the moment, I’ve settled on CoRD, largely due to its ease of use but both clients seem to offer a great improvement over Microsoft’s RDP offering for Mac users.

Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux without a subscription

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve written previously about why open source software is not really free (as in monetary value), just free (as in freedom). Companies such as Red Hat and Novell (SUSE) make their money from support and during Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) setup, it is “strongly recommended” that the system is set up for software updates via Red Hat Network (RHN), citing the benefits of an RHEL subscription as:

  • “Security and updates: receive the latest software updates, including security updates, keeping [a] Red Hat Enterprise Linux system updated and secure.
  • Downloads and upgrades: download installation images for Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, including new releases.
  • Support: Access to the technical support experts at Red Hat or Red Hat’s partners for help with any issues you might encounter with [a] system.
  • Compliance: Stay in compliance with your subscription agreement and manage subscriptions for systems connected to [an] account at http://rhn.redhat.com/

You will not be able to take advantage of these subscriptions privileges without connecting [a] system to Red Hat Network.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 installer

Take a look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and you’ll see that it’s actually quite expensive – a standard subscription for a machine with up to 2 processor sockets including 1 year’s 12×5 telephone support, 1 year of web access and unlimited incidents is €773.19 [source: Red Hat Online Shop, Europe]. That is not something that I can afford and even though Red Hat gave me a copy of RHEL 5 as part of my recent training, it only includes a 30-day subscription. Now they have launched Red Hat Exchange – a new service whereby third party open source software solutions are purchased, delivered and supported via a single, standardized Red Hat subscription agreement with consolidated billing covering the complete application stack. It’s a great idea, but the pricing for some of the packages makes using proprietary alternatives seem quite competitive.

In fairness to Red Hat, they sponsor the Fedora Project for users like me, who could probably make do with a community-supported release (Fedora is free for anyone to use modify and distribute) but there is another option – CentOS (the community enterprise operating system), which claims to be:

“An Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor[‘]s redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.”

Hmm… so which North American Enterprise Linux vendor might that be then ;-)

So what about RHEL systems for which the subscription has expired? I’m not sure what the legal standpoint is but there is a way to receive updated software using an unregistered copy of RHEL. Firstly, configuring additional repositories like Dag Wieer’s RPMForgethere are even RPMs available to set up the correct repository! Then, there are the various RPM search sites on the ‘net, including:

I’ve found that using these, even if there is not an appropriate RHEL or generic RPM available, there is often a CentOS RPM (which often still carries the el5 identifier in the filename). These should be safe to install on an RHEL system and in those rare cases when a bleeding edge package is required, there may well be a Fedora version that can be used. So it seems that I can continue to run a Linux distribution that is recognised by most software vendors, even when my RHN subscription expires.

Creating a Media Center Mac

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

It’s not often that I come away from a Microsoft event as excited as I was after the recent Vista after hours session.

You see, we have a problem at home… our DVD player has stopped recognising discs. That shouldn’t really be a problem (DVD players are cheap enough to replace) but it’s a CD/DVD player, tuner and surround-sound amplifier and I don’t really want to have to replace the entire system because of one broken DVD drive. So I took it apart (thinking that Sony might use the same drives in their consumer electronic devices as in a normal PCs), only to find that the externally slim slot-loading drive is actually a huge beast with cogs and is actually nothing like anything I’ve ever seen before.

Faced with the prospect of a hefty repair bill, I began to think that this (combined with the fact that we never know what is on our video tapes) could be the excuse I need to install a media PC in the living room? Well, possibly, but there are some hurdles to overcome first.

I’ve been toying with a media PC for a while now but, however hard manufacturers try, pretty much none of them is likely to pass the wife approval factor (WAF) – not even the lovely machines produced by a French system builder called Invasion.

It’s not that my wife is demanding – far from it in fact – but she wasn’t too keen on my “black loud cr@p” (my semi-decent hi-fi separates) when we first moved in together and the shiny silver box (the one that’s now broken) was the replacement… I just can’t see anything that isn’t similarly small and shiny being tolerated anywhere other than my den.

I even saw an article in the July 2006 edition of Personal Computer World magazine, which showed how to build a living room PC using old hi-fi separates for the case; however you need a pretty large case for anything that’s going to make use of full-size PC components. Then there’s the issue of the system software… I tried Media Portal a while back but found it a bit buggy; Myth TV is supposed to be pretty good but I believe it can also be difficult to set up properly; the Apple TV sounded good at first – except that it doesn’t have PVR capabilities and relies on many hacks to get it working the way I would like it and (crucially) lists a TV with HDMI or component video inputs as one of its prerequisites – I was beginning to think that the best answer for me may be a Mac Mini with a TV adapter hooked up to my aging, but rather good, Sony Trinitron TV.

Then, at the Vista After Hours event, I saw the latest version of Windows Media Center – Mac OS X includes Front Row but Media Center has some killer features… and I have two spare copies of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (thank you Microsoft)! Why not install Vista on a Mac Mini, then plug in a USB TV tuner (maybe more than one) and use this as a DVD player, PVR and all round home entertainment system?

I’ve written previously about installing Windows Vista on my Mac but I never activated that installation and I later removed Boot Camp altogether as I found that I never actually bothered to boot into Windows. The latest Boot Camp beta (v1.2) includes Windows Vista support (including drivers for the remote control) so I thought I’d give it a try on my existing Mac Mini before (potentially) splashing out on another one for the living room.

After downloading and installing Boot Camp and running the Boot Camp Assistant to create a Windows driver CD, I moved on to partitioning the disk, only to be presented with the following error:

The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.  Backup the disk and use Disk Utility to format as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume.  Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.

Backing up and restoring my system… sounds a bit risky to me.

Then I found Garrett Murray’s post about how the problem is really caused by files over 4GB in size. That may have worked in Garrett’s case (FAT32 disks will not support files over 4GB) but despite using WhatSize to track down a DVD image that was taking a chunk of space on my disk, I couldn’t get past the message (even after various reboots, starting the system in single user mode to run AppleJack and even starting the system without any login items). In the end, I gave in and accepted that my system disk required defragmenting, setting about the lengthy process of backing up with Carbon Copy Cloner, booting from the backup disk, erasing the system disk and restoring my data. Thankfully this worked and left me with a defragmented system disk, which Boot Camp Assistant was able to divide into two partitions.

After catching some sleep, I set about the installation of Windows Vista. I had a few issues with Boot Camp Assistant failing to recognise my DVD (either the one I created with the RTM files from Microsoft Connect, or a genuine DVD from Microsoft) – this was the message:

The installer CD could not be found.  Insert your Windows CD and wait a few seconds for the disk to be recognized.

It turns out that Boot Camp Assistant wasn’t happy with me running as a standard user – once I switched to an Administrator account everything kicked into life and I soon had Vista installed after a very straightforward installation. Furthermore, Apple has done a lot of work on Windows driver support and items that didn’t work with my previous attempt (like the Apple Remote) are now supported by Boot Camp 1.2 and Windows Vista. Sadly, my external iSight camera does not seem to be supported (only the internal variants). It also seems that my Windows Experience Index base score has improved to 3.3 (it was 3.0 when I installed Vista as an upgrade from Windows XP with Boot Camp v1.1.2).

After this, it wasn’t long before I had Media Center up and running, connected to the TV in my office – although that’s where the disappointment started. The Apple Remote does work but it’s so simple that menu controls (Media Center and DVD menus) necessitate resorting to keyboard/mouse control – basically all that it can do is adjust the volume, skip forward/backwards, play and pause. What I needed was a Windows Media Remote (and so what if it has 44 buttons instead of six? The Apple remote is far more elegant but six buttons clearly isn’t enough!):

Apple remote control Windows Media Center remote control

(It’s a pity that I didn’t see the pictures of the prototype Windows Vista Media Center remotes first, or else I would have tried to get one of the alternative remotes from Philips).

Also, after switching back to my monitor, the display had reverted to basic (2D) graphics and I needed to re-enable the Windows Aero theme. Clearly that’s a little cumbersome and would soon become a pain if I had to do it frequently; however in practice it’s likely that I’ll leave the computer connected to either the TV or the monitor – not both.

I also needed a TV receiver – I was able to pick up an inexpensive Freeview (DVB-T) USB adapter (£29.99 including postage) and a Windows Media Remote (£21.99). Although the Digital terrestrial TV signal in my house is weak, I was pretty sure that I’d be able to boost it, and anyway, having a portable Freeview device will always be handy. Windows Vista didn’t recognise the device natively but I downloaded the latest drivers and despite being unsigned, they installed without issue. Unfortunately, Windows Media Center still didn’t recognise my tuner but the problem turned out to be that I had plugged the device into the Apple keyboard (which I think is USB 1.1) and once I plugged it into on of the Mac’s own USB 2.0 ports then I was able to set up the TV functionality within Windows Media Center – no need to bother with the TV guide and tuning software supplied with the device (although it did take a while to download the TV program guide and to scan for channels).

My local TV transmitter is at Sandy Heath and, although I tried other transmitters too, using the supplied aerial I could only pick up channels in multiplex D. Even the cheap £9.99 Labgear aerial that sits on top of my TV could pick up those channels! Ideally, I’d use an externally-mounted roof aerial but that wasn’t an option and for £19.99 I picked up the highly-rated Telecam TCE2001 at and was able to pick up 53 channels in mutiplexes 1, 2, B, C and D (and that was without using the signal booster). By boosting the signal the scan picked up 70 channels, although not all of them were strong enough to view.

As for the Windows Media Remote, I found that it didn’t work with the built-in IR receiver (it needed to use the supplied, but rather bulky Microsoft receiver); however this is not as bad as it sounds – the Microsoft receiver has a long USB cable, meaning that it can be placed next to the TV (the logical place to point the remote at), rather than wherever the computer is.

So, with working drivers and a functioning remote control, Windows Media Center was happy enough to let me watch and record TV using it’s built in electronic programme guide…

The final piece of the puzzle was pre-recorded media in a variety of formats such as QuickTime movies and DivX. After transferring the files from an OS X hard drive to something that Windows could read, I decided to see what Windows Media Center could play. I’m still working out exactly which codecs I need – I tried various combinations of XviD/DivX/3ivX plus the AC3 filter and ffdshow – these seemed to enable most of my content; however I’m still experiencing difficulties with some movies that were originally encoded as AVI and then converted for QuickTime/iTunes on the Mac (using Apple QuickTime Pro) and also some unprotected AAC audio with JPEG stills in the video track – e.g. some of the podcasts that I listen to. Through all this codec troubleshooting, one tool that I found incredibly useful was GSpot.

[the original version of this post referred to a codec pack which I have been advised may contain illegal software. As it is not my intention to publicly condone the use of such software, and as I’m not convinced that it is required in order to make this solution work, I have removed it from this post and edited the corresponding comments.]

After going to all of this effort to get Media Center running on my Mac, was it worth it? Yes! The Windows Media Center (2007) interface is excellent, without a hint of the standard Windows interface (as is right for a consumer electronics device) and is simply (and intuitively) controlled using the remote control. It’s not perfect (very few interfaces are) but it is better than Front Row. If I do carry on using this to record TV though, I will need to provide more disk space. One feature that I particularly liked though, was how, even when working in other Windows applications, a discrete taskbar notification appeared, showing me that Media Center was recording something:

Windows Media Center recording notification

So, having tested this Media Center Mac concept on the Mac Mini that I use for my daily computing, I need to decide whether to donate it for family use in the living room and buy myself something new (MacBook Pro or Mac Pro are just too pricey to justify… but should I get a MacBook or another Mac Mini?) or just to pick up a second-hand Mac Mini for the family. The trouble is that second-hand Mac Minis cost almost as much as new ones. Still, at least I’ve proved the concept… I’ll have to see if this technology bundle passes the WAF test first!

Recovering data after destroying the Mac OS X partition table

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m not a religious man but every once in a while I do something stupid and find myself hoping for some divine intervention. Yesterday, I excelled in my stupidity with what was probably the single most careless thing that I have ever done in my entire computing life, accidentally re-initialising my external hard disk (containing, amongst other things, my iTunes library and irreplaceable digital photos of my children) and the backup disk.

In a mild state of panic, I called my friend Alex who gave me two excellent pieces of advice:

  • Do nothing with the corrupted disks. Sit tight. Calm down. Wait and see what turns up from researching similar scenarios on the ‘net.
  • Submit a post to some of the Mac forums (Mac OS X Hints, Apple Discussions, Mac Geekery) and see if anyone can recommend a suitable course of action.

Thank you Alex.

And thank you Stanley Horwitz, debaser626, Tom Larkin and Joe VanZandt for coming back to me with recommendations almost straightaway. Almost everyone suggested running a tool from Prosoft Engineering called Data Rescue II.

In addition to its primary role of recovering lost data on hard disks, this $99 utility (a small price in comparision to professional data recovery fees) has two especially important features: it is non-destructive as all restoration has to be to another volume; and it can be run in demo mode first to check that data is recoverable before having to be registered.

A quick scan turned up no recoverable files but a thorough scan was more useful. After a few hours reading 6 billion disk blocks and another couple analysing the data, it found my files. Unfortunately the progress bar gives no indication as to how many files might be recoverable whilst the scan is taking place, presumably because files may be spread across many disk blocks but it found my files!

The recovered files were marked as orphans, CBR (whatever that is) and then a whole load of them actually had their original file names and other metadata. After successfully recovering a single file, I bought a license and set about recovering the entire contents of the disk to another volume. Unfortunately it hung after failing to read one of the files but I repeated the operation (this time saving my scan results so that I can exit and relaunch the application if necessary) and successfully restored my digital photos. The relief is immense and I’m presently running a full restoration of the entire disk contents (I imagine that a large part of tomorrow will be spent working out which files I need, and which were actually deliberately deleted files recovered along with the lost data).

Other potentially useful tools, which I didn’t try but which might be useful to others, include:

  • GRC Spinrite – for proactive hard disk maintenance and recovery of data from failing hard disks (disk recovery – not partition recovery)
  • Alsoft DiskWarrior – for damaged directory structures (file system recovery – not partion recovery).
  • SubRosaSoft File Salvage – another partition recovery tool.

Note that I haven’t tried any of these tools myself – I’m simply alerting any poor soul who stumbles across this page to their existence.

I was lucky. Very lucky.

The moral of this story – don’t rely on a single backup that is overwritten nightly and permanently connected to your computer. I really must take more frequent DVD backups of crucial files and store a disk backup offsite.

I should know better.

Defragmenting a Mac OS X hard disk

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Apple claims that OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. If that’s the case, then why does it lack basic system utilities? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’ve written before about OS X’s lack of a decent backup utility and today (including most of tonight – hence the time of this post) I fell foul of its inability to defragment hard disks.

“ah… but you don’t need a defragmentation utility with OS X because it automatically defragments as it goes.”

[insert name of just about any Macintosh support forum here]

Wrong.

OS X defragments files, but not the disk itself (for an explaination as to what that really means and as to whether it’s really necessary, refer to Randy B Singer’s Mac OS X maintenance and troubleshooting guide). This inability to perform what should be a basic operating system function (even Windows has the capability) has cost me a lot of time today. In fairness, there is a third party utility availabilty (if I was prepared to pay for it), called iDefrag (Paul Stamatiou has a review of iDefrag on his site) but in the end, I used Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my hard disk to my backup drive, make that bootable, repartition my system disk, and then clone the drive back again – a pretty long winded approach to defragmentation.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining… at least this process led me to discover the the Mac OS X maintenance and troubleshooting guide that I referred to earlier… well worth a read.

Missing QuickTime codecs

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this week, I needed to play back a .AVI file in iTunes/Front Row. That’s not really a problem as it’s easy to convert the video to a .MOV file using Apple QuickTime Pro but one major issue was a complete lack of sound.

Now, before I go any further I should explain that there is one common theme throughout the comments section of every site discussing media formats and players – someone always says something to the effect of “use VLC – it plays everything”. VLC is a great media player but:

  • I have Apple QuickTime Pro.
  • I use Apple iTunes and Front Row (both of which depend on QuickTime).
  • QuickTime components are available for many audio and video formats.

In other words, using VLC isn’t the right solution for me. QuickTime gave me a clue as to the problem as it informed me that:

Some necessary QuickTime software is missing. It may be available on the QuickTime Web site.
If you have a dialup connection to the internet, make sure it is active, then click the Continue button to check for the software.

I could have worked out for myself that I was missing a codec (and that message is pretty poorly written… should I not click continue if I don’t have a dialup connection? Maybe I’m reading the message too literally!) but clicking continue took me to the QuickTime components page and I didn’t know which one I needed. I was pretty sure that the video was an XviD movie and I already had the DivX codec (v6.4) as well as Christoph Nägeli’s XviD codec (v0.51) installed but then I found a big clue in the XviD FAQ:

It’s important to understand that video and audio are two separate things, which when combined make up movies. A movie consists of a video stream for the picture and an audio stream for the sound. The XviD codec is what makes it possible to decode the video stream, but it has nothing to do with decoding the audio stream. If the sound in a movie isn’t working you have to find out which audio codec is missing and install it.

The FAQ continues to explain how to use a Windows utility called GSpot to identify the necessary codecs but after reading Mike Peck’s article about playing XviD movies on an Intel Mac (and Paul Stamatiou’s follow-up post on getting Front Row to play XviD, DivX and 3ivX videos), I realised that the missing codec was for AC-3 (Dolby Digital). After installing the A52Codec (v1.7.2) for AC-3 playback and restarting QuickTime and iTunes I was able to watch my video, complete with the previously-missing audio stream.

I’m sure that over time I’ll need to add more codecs and one potentially useful resource is afreeCodec , offering downloads for Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers, games consoles and mobile phones.

What was that password again?

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In the course of my daily computing activities I have to remember hundreds of username and password combinations. Literally. Just at work there are two (yes two!) timesheet applications, then there’s my corporate domain credentials, remote access, mobile phone billing portal, etc., each with their own username and password complexity/expiry policies; then there are all the systems at home; and finally the plethora of websites at which I have an account.

There are those who say that writing down credentials is a bad idea, whilst others say that using a single username and password combination is bad practice – these people are absolutely correct as, once compromised, an attacker has access to all the systems that use those credentials but we also need to be pragmatic – how can any user seriously be expected to remember all the usernames and passwords for the multitude of systems that they access? Indeed, many of the credentials I used are stored in my browser’s password manager – I haven’t a clue what my password is and I just open up the page and let my browser auto-complete the fields for me.

If we cast our minds back a few years to the launch of the Microsoft.net Framework, Passport.net was supposed to take away a lot of the hassle for web service authentication and we all know what a failure Passport was (outside Microsoft) – people just didn’t want Microsoft holding the keys to all their systems – InfoCard could well succeed where Passport failed but I have an identity crisis right here, right now!

One of the systems that I access regularly was recently moved to a new server – hence to a new URL and so the stored username and password didn’t work for me. This is where one of the handy system utilities that I wrote about a while back came in useful – I went to the old URL for the application, let the browser auto-complete the details and Nirsoft AsterWin IE was able to scan for the stored password, which I could then manually enter at the new site.

Of course, this advice comes with all the usual caveats when using third party applications to probe for security details… I haven’t checked for any unwanted side effects of using this application and you have been warned!

Creating a FAT32 volume in excess of 32GB

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back I wrote about some of the issues I was having with using FAT32-formatted disks for data transfer between Windows, Mac OS X (and Linux) PCs, because although FAT32 supports file systems up to 2TB in size, the format utilities within Windows support a maximum partition size of 32GB and FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB (which doesn’t sound like an issue until you start copying .ISO DVD images and digital video files around).

Even though I use MacDrive for reading OS X disks on Windows XP, I still find it useful to have a FAT32 disk to back up the VMware Server virtual machine which I use to run Windows XP on a Linux notebook PC for my daily work. I did find a great utility a few weeks back for reading ext3 disks on Windows (I think it was Explore2fs), but it’s the universal acceptance of FAT32 that makes it so easy to use everywhere. The trouble is that my virtual machine is about 31GB in size and growing – consequently I needed to create a partition larger than 32GB.

In my original post, I mentioned that FAT32 volumes in excess of 32Gb can be created – Windows is able to read or write larger volumes it just can’t create them natively (the workaround is to use another operating system or third-party tools). In my case, I used the Mac OS X Disk Utility – the important point is to ensure that the disk options are set to use as master boot record (not a GUID partition table or an Apple partition map) after which MS-DOS File System becomes available as a formatting option, allowing me to create a FAT32 disk which filled my entire 55.89GB disk – plenty of room for my virtual machine files and more.

Utility to discover detailed information about PC hardware

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I needed to know a little bit of very technical information about the hardware in one of my PCs today (whether or not the processor supported the SSE2 instruction set) and in the process I found a great utility that details just about everything I could ever need to know about a PC’s CPU, cache, mainboard, and memory – the utility is called CPUID CPU-Z is and it is freeware. It’s also worth checking out some of the other utilities on the CPUID website.

Trouble with torrents

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about my initial experiences of using a BitTorrent client for peer-to-peer file sharing, which, contrary to popular belief, is not only exclusively used for illegal content distribution. The trouble is, that I’ve found it difficult to get going with BitTorrent as a content distribution mechanism. My download speeds were very slow and certain clients seemed to prevent any of my computers from using my Internet connection. I tried a few clients (BitTorrent, Azureus and Xtorrent – all on the Mac, although BitTorrent and Azureus are available for other platforms too) and it looks as though I finally have a configuration that works.

My ISP does traffic shape to reduce the impact of P2P traffic but does not aggressively prohibit P2P traffic; having said that I moved away from the standard ports and picked something up high (above 10000) to avoid any issues.

Using BitTorrent, there was an element of doubt as to whether I had a working connection – peers seemed to be disconnecting me as though I was leeching (clearly I have to download something before I can make it available to upload) and I do use a NAT router (which can complicate things). One of the best features in the Azureus client is the traffic light system that it uses for various elements including share ratio and NAT traversal – I had a green light for NAT, but the share ratio was always red/amber so I struggled to get a decent download speed.

I heard on the Macbreak Weekly review of the Apple TV how Xtorrent is a very simple to use BitTorrent client for OS X and after trying it out I’m blown away with how simple it has been in comparison to the other clients that I tried. I’ve been trying to download a 1.3GB file for days now using Azureus and, because of the problem whereby it seems to hog my Internet connection (despite following advice for good connection parameters), I could only run it when I didn’t need to use the network (i.e. at night). Even so, after two nights, I had only managed to retrieve a measly 0.1% of the file. I’ve been using Xtorrent for a few hours now, have most of the file downloaded and have seen transfer speeds as high as 300Kbps (2.4Mbps), but there is a catch – after an hour, downloads are capped at 10Kbps (although the warning says 10kbps – i.e. 8 times slower) and search results are randomly disabled. I’ve also noticed (but cannot confirm) that connection speeds drop significantly if Xtorrent is not the active application.

The search is not such a big deal (all it seems to do is append “torrent” to the supplied query and submit that search to Google and Yahoo! using an embedded browser window) but the “all sales are final” notice at the bottom of the web page and the aggressive registration message when the application is running, combined with no mention of the free version’s limitations on the website do not exactly fill me with confidence about the product (the website encourages download of the $20 pro edition but does not mention that the standard version is limited – in reality there is a free, limited, trial and the full, registered, product is $20 with no “pro” features, it’s just an unlimited version). Xtorrent may well have been “hand-crafted with care” but it’s only just out of beta and there seem to be so many issues to consider with BitTorrent clients that I want to be 100% certain this is the right client for me before parting with cash.

As it happens, I probably will buy Xtorrent, as it seems incredibly simple to use, had no problem using the port I’d previously opened (and verified using Shields UP!) for Azureus, seems to work well, includes RSS integration, allows browsing of file content prior to download and lets me set bandwidth limits according to the time of day and how busy my computer is. All in all, the user experience is excellent – I just wish that the website was a little more upfront about the limitations of the free download.